Don’t Let Your Mother Answer for You

My wife saw it in six years of marriage and never said it, because she knew what saying it would cost her.

So she put it at the bottom of a letter instead, in one line, at the end of four pages, in the hope that a man eight thousand miles away might read it.

Please come yourself, Ivan.

Whatever it is.

Don’t let your mother answer for you.

He came seven years late, and only because a box was opened in a kitchen on Chestnut Street by a woman who could have kept it closed for the rest of her life and would have been entitled to.

Last month he stayed at mine for a week in the summer, and on the Thursday night he could not sleep, and he came out to the front room at about eleven where I was working, and he sat on the arm of the sofa the way he does, and he said: